I DECLARE I AM HERE

A portrait series marking 30 years of democracy, celebrated in South Africa in 2024. The series reflects on how the denizens of inner city Johannesburg navigate the colonial, apartheid and postcolonial architecture and spaces with grit and with grace.

I Declare I Am Here

The title " I Declare I Am Here' has to do with 'standing your ground' something that was difficult for many under Apartheid. Fantastical street art and gritty urban palimpsests are the passing backdrops against which the people of the city declare themselves, their stances and sartorial choices echoing patterns in the urban fabric. Fleeting juxtapositions of culture, personal style and inner-city ephemera provide snap readings of a complex city in constant change and offer glimpses into the deeper urban strains of heritage, migration, xenophobia, crime, security, faith, aspiration and adaptation.

These episodic portraits lightly record pedestrians as they pass through Johannesburg suburbs steeped in history - Fordsburg, Doornfontein, Braamfontein, Hillbrow, Berea, Kensington, Jeppestown and City and Suburban – often on public holidays.

South Africa has many public holidays, and some were established in response to particular moments in the country’s history – Heritage Day, Youth Day (commemorating the June 16 massacre when protesting Soweto school children were killed by apartheid police), Human Rights Day, Freedom Day (commemorating the day Nelson Mandela cast his first vote after spending 27 years in prison) and Day of Reconciliation. Each of these public holidays holds different meanings for Johannesburg’s varied communities and intersecting cultural enclaves. Johannesburg’s cultural diversity is most abundantly apparent on its public holidays, and in the inner city, everyone dresses up.

When explaining his use of black and white film during the days of apartheid, South African photographer David Goldblatt famously said, ‘Colour film was too sweet for apartheid.’ Several decades later, those who tread the streets of downtown Johannesburg announce their passing presence via a loud assembly of colour and pattern.

South Africa’s wealthiest and most populous city, Johannesburg, is at once a vital, rich and functioning metropolis and a dystopian city approaching the brink of multi-modal collapse. Rolling electricity blackouts, water cuts, high crime rates, rampant corruption and rising unemployment have catalysed waves of violent protest and episodes of lawlessness, such as the xenophobic violence that erupted in September 2019. As people from myriad different nations stream in and out of Johannesburg along its network of highways and railways, South Africa wrestles with questions of borders and belonging.

Grim news headlines overlay some of the Johannesburg’s older legends - City of gold; City of dreams - yet Johannesburg is anything but skin deep. Its layers begin in the depths of the world’s deepest gold mines and rise to the top floors of the continent’s tallest buildings.

Since the discovery of gold in 1886, Johannesburg has been an economic mecca, its truly cross-cultural identity reflected at street level in a richness of cuisines and tongues. The rate of urbanisation since the early 90s has been extremely high, driven by in-migration but strongly characterised by the arrival of migrants from all around Africa. The breaking down and building up of the urban fabric mirrors the breaking down and building up of social and political orders. Against the backdrop of the inner city’s ageing architecture significant shifts in the nature of street life occurs monthly, and it is only the graffiti works of local artists that are able to keep up.

The photographs were made in an organic, intuitive fashion. They record fleeting interactions between the photographer, the inhabitants of the city and the city itself, with its peeling walls, brut poster-covered concrete pillars and flyovers, littered pavements and potholed streets. Traditional dress and street fashion combine, reflecting the hybrid identities and personal creativity of random passers-by going about their everyday business.

Many of the photographs were taken in the city's cavernous network of concrete underpasses. South Africa’s highway and railway system is part of a network of transportation that has it beginnings in 1948, the year the National Party gained power and began enforcing policies of racial segregation. The Johannesburg Ring road by example was created to allow for the mobility of Apartheid South African Army to defend the state from hostile neighbours and to quell anti-apartheid violence.

Like Johannesburg’s transient street art that is periodically erased, there is a flux of people navigating architecture of a by-gone era etched with memory, reclaiming colonial, apartheid and post apartheid spaces and reinventing identities in the process, with grit and with grace.